We’re Back!

Although Jacques, Krissy, and I have taken a rather long break from blogging about Stories Matter, we have been busy thinking about the software nevertheless. For the most part, Jacques has spent the last three months tirelessly coding and creating Stories Matter. He released the first version of the software during the second week of December and since then he has been trying to integrate all of the features that we requested into it. This has been an incredible interdisciplinary journey and it is exciting to see our oral history “dream list” come to life in this program. While Jacques has yet to release a beta version of the software – it should be released in the next few weeks – Stories Matter does work and will start to be used by all of us as well as by the members of our new database building team this week; I welcome Erin Jessee, Allison Eades and Claudia Gama to the project!

I really want to commend Jacques for all of his hard work up to this point. Since we are committed to creating open source software, Jacques has had to find and work with open source technologies that will meet all of our needs as oral historians and still be compatible with PC, Mac and Linux operating systems. While we were probably too optimistic in mapping out our timeline, Jacques remains committed to this project, despite the many challenges he has had to overcome during the last three months.

As of Friday, we have a working version of Stories Matter. After loading Adobe Air and the software itself, it is then possible to create a new oral history project and save that project. Upon saving the project, one can then upload audio or video (FLV) files into the application. The media player allows users to listen to and/or watch their interviews and they may also make smaller clips of their interviews. The spaces, where one can reflect upon the interviews, make notes, and append attachments, among other things, and the search feature and tag cloud are also working at this time. The custom playlist and export features of the software, the last major functions yet to be incorporated into the program, should be working within the next week or so. As Jacques continues to code, we will be working as a team to make the program as intuitive as possible. We will continue to keep you posted with regular blogs about the development of the software and the building of databases.